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Monday, January 2, 2012

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

Granted this one isn't music related but we over here at RtBE have long admired the work and social life of the late, great Christopher Hitchens and we wanted to pay tribute to him. The man had a knack for causing people to think, getting under your skin, infuriating and defying all categorisations when it came to large topics and small ones.

Simply put he was a great thinker (drinker) and conveyor of his thoughts. He addressed these inconsistencies (especially when it came to politics) in an interview with Richard Dawkins:

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on
the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the
one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your
head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are
theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a
supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who
can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

He sounds like a Jedi and in some ways I bet he followed those cosmic properties as a free thinker, or at least he strove for them. It is hard to feel sorry for Hitchens as he was true about living his life to the fullest, however when the world losses a great mind it is impossible not to think, "What more could have been?".

In one of his last interviews before he was told he was sick, he sat down and talked at NYPL about his memoir and why he was writing it, you can view the whole conversation here (Skip to 7 minutes in on first video to skip the commercial and get right to Hitch), but below is an excerpt regarding Death being a liberating thought and experience, lets hope it was: